Mid Cheshire College - Case Study

The Client

Mid Cheshire College aim’s to provide a first-class, caring, learning environment for each of its 6,000+ students. It has been awarded Beacon College status, the highest accolade in the world of further education and acknowledges it as one of the best colleges in the country. Its online presence and user experience was identified
as not meeting these standards and students expectations.

The Brief

To deliver an enhanced online user experience, with integrated services the new digital platform should act as a central hub for up-to-date college information as well as a flexible promotion tool to aid the marketing departments push to improve Mid Cheshire’s visibility.

To have a contemporary, simple to use website

To drive more enquires to the college through the website

To minimise the number of clicks required to reach relevant information

To create a smooth and efficient application process

To have clear and concise text to ensure that prospective learners know that Mid Cheshire College is the right choice to provide a successful learning environment offering a wide range of courses

To be built with SEO in mind, including keyword integration, to aid prospective customers in finding the site

To have detailed analytics and tracking data integrated to allow the measurement of visitors and behaviours.

To have a content management system (CMS) to allow editing and modifying content via a word style editor – adding and removing images, text and links

Key Objectives

The user journey needed to be rethought as it often took a number of clicks to find an appropriate course

The website didn’t integrate seamlessly into the colleges internal course system, so often there would be a disparity in the content
of both systems which caused confusion for students and teachers

Applications by prospective students would frequently not be filled in properly requiring the college to chase these students for required information before they could process any applications which was time consuming

The course pages were often very dry and didn’t sell the courses as well as they could

Our Solution

TMC’s response involved understanding the requirements of key stakeholders as well as the student and prospective students who would use the platform. We achieved this by holding several workshop sessions to define the needs and aspirations and highlight any areas within the colleges process that could be streamlined to ensure the site is kept up to date with a minimum of fuss.

Our team designed and created a solution built with Wordpress which integrates with a number of other services such as eLearning and student email as well as their new student management and information system, which when updated, automatically populates the site with recent course information. This new digital platform has received very positive reviews from staff and students alike.

The Result

As well as the positive reviews the new platforms biggest achievements to date are:

Improving the user journey so that prospective students can quickly find a course of interest to them and apply with a minimum of clicks. This has been reduced from anywhere up to 7 clicks to 3

Vastly improving the application process for students looking to attend the college by breaking the form into simple steps and highlighting what information was required to complete the process. Almost all applications are now fully completed

Streamlining the course update process meaning that the site always displays the latest information which historically it had struggled with. This has meant less duplication of work and a consistent information structure across internal systems and the website

Course pages can now include a range of supplementary information to sell the courses to prospective students, such as videos, alumni case studies, course social accounts, etc. Mid Cheshire will also too be rolling out the responsibility of updating course pages to teachers so they can have more input in the management of how their courses are represented online

Increased traffic volumes as well as reduced bounce rates for all departments